Workshop 2
 Contents
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Section
K Innovation and transformation
Activity
K1 Review and further planning |
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Aims
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To reconsider the
‘stories’ about transformations
in the light of your further experiences.
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To build on work already
undertaken in planning a
single lesson to consider how to include computer modelling more
systematically
into your schemes of work.
Background
Now you have planned and
taught a single lesson,
this final activity is concerned with how computer modelling can be
incorporated
more systematically into the curriculum as a whole. In the first
workshop
you considered some stories about teachers’ transformations of
innovations.
For each of the areas, you identified a few key sentences that you
thought
addressed the most important ideas for you. In the planning of the
first
lesson, you were asked to consider how these factors affected the
choices
that you made. Having taught and evaluated the lesson, it will be
helpful
to look again at these key ideas, and to think about whether any of
your
ideas have changed. Many no doubt will have remained the same, as many
of our ideas and beliefs are very stable and fundamental to the way we
see ourselves as individuals. Some ideas though may change in the light
of experience. For example, we are often surprised that tasks that seem
difficult are accomplished easily when we try them with pupils, and
what
we think of as easy tasks turn out to be more difficult than we thought.
What to do
1. Look back to the
activities in sections
C, D, E and F, and consider the key sentences that you identified. Do
you
still agree with each of these points? Are there other ideas from these
stories that you now think are more important? If you have changed your
ideas, what caused you to do so?
2. Plan how
you could use computer models
and simulations systematically in your schemes of work. You should
think
about how to achieve progression in computer modelling by building up
the
ideas over longer periods of time. You might do this in one of a number
of ways, for example, by considering:
-
a sequence of lessons
within a topic over a time
period of a few weeks;
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a number of different
topics within a single year;
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a specific concept (such
as current flow or velocity
and acceleration) over the whole experience of a pupil at the school.
As in planning the single
lesson, make some notes
that justify the choices you have made. Think about how your choices
have
been influences by factors such as the subject content, your beliefs
about
learning, your values, and by customary practices and constraints.
You may wish to refer
to the websites that were
given in the first workshop as a source of ideas about the range of
resources
available:
Information
about computer modelling: and simulations at the Virtual Teachers’
Centre
Reviews
of software on the NGfL ‘Educational Software Database’
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